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Happy People have no Stories.

OK, following an exchange on Deviant art, I've decided to write a short story:

S7alker117
That sounds really
cool. Looks like the kind of setting where you could write some great
stories in, a little in the line of 1632, dunno if you know the series?

pickledtezcat
I hadn't heard about 1632, but I just looked it up. Sounds interesting.I actually have got a plan to write some stories in the setting, and possibly open it up to anyone else who wanted to.

I
love the alternative history novels of Harry Turtledove, the way he
uses ordinary people who can enter and leave the narrative at any time
instead of main characters who can't die.It allows him to really put
in the background details while sketching out the overarching themes
and history. (1632 sounds somewhat like this from reading the wikipedia
article)

The thing I love about his books the most though is that
you never know who is going to win. It's not like real history, where
we already know who won the second world war. With Alternative history
you get a real thrill from hearing the reports of a battle, or watching
the ebb and flow of the fortunes of war over time. (I especially like
that it's only fiction. No real people suffered and died, it's just
imagination).

You don't get burdened with hindsight, you're not
constantly thinking "What an idiot! He should have seen that coming!"
Characters can make mistakes and it's normal and human of them.

It's
something I really enjoyed while reading the Battletech novels too.
Though the early BT novels had their share of "super" heroes who never
made mistakes and never made bad decisions, the middle period had tons
of great characters who acted as best they knew how, but still ended up
failing sometimes.

Lots of modern stories, (movies, Video games
and novels) fall in to the trap of "the chosen one" trope. The main
character is special and unique, can't die, always gets out of every bad
situation (often resorting to deus ex machina) and always gets the
girl. I'd like to write some stories where the characters are ordinary
people with ordinary stories, but living in a time and place we don't
have any foreknowledge of.

I want to introduce the setting of Vinland 1936 with a work of fiction which will set the scene. The characters will talk about other places, recent events, current political and social trends and reveal the cultural bias and prejudices of their era and locales.

There will be several main threads, each one told from the POV of an ordinary soldier or civilian. Right now I have Three of the threads planned out with locations and characters. The individual threads will be quite short, and the story will be made up of the threads intertwining.

It will be set before the events of the game, in 1922, the end of a long war between the Holy Roman Empire and the Arab/Turks.

I like the way you can organize your scenes, your characters and locations and see an overview which lets you keep it all under control. It's a bit outdated but I'll give it a try and if I like using it I may get something better later.

I suppose this counts as wasting time, but it's something I've wanted to try for a long time. Let's just see how it goes. :)

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I'm going back to my real time tactics project, Vinland 1936.
While working on the other project I overcame the problems which were stopping me from saving/loading the game and also cleaned up the base code a lot.

After a few weeks I'm getting near the the state I was in before.

Infantry are back to their previous state, and vehicles are running OK.
This time I'm going to push ahead with mocking up the combat system though before I work any more on the vehicle builder or graphical aspects of the game.

I finished working on the code for adding foliage and having some extra time I decided to experiment with the code for rockets.

The original idea I had was that rockets would be large vehicle components that can be fired very quickly, regardless of how much manpower is used for reloading.

They would use up a lot of ammo, so they would run dry after a short but devastating barrage.
The problem here is that it's easy to take advantage of this by adding a lot of ammo, which is much smaller than in bulk than the rockets.

There's also the problem of firing large caliber rockets. In real life rockets of up to 30cm were used, but I think that will be too powerful for the scale of combat in this game.

lol. Somehow that one trooper survived the mother of all explosions...

A 30cm rocket could contain nearly 30KG of explosive. That would be a very large explosion.

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I've been working a lot on the game recently and I've nearly rebuilt it to the level it was before. Past that maybe, since now I have the beginning of a working combat system and the ability to save and load the game.

Infantry can now occupy a building. It's quite an abstract representation, since they stay at the door and turn invisible. But they can then fire from one of the windows and take damage from shots at the windows too. I think I've set it up well so that when building damage and destruction is working then the system should continue to work.

For combat I tried some new ideas, but they didn't work out that well. It seems that it's important that viewing range should be further than shooting range. Now shooting range is pegged at 18 units of distance, while viewing range can extend out past that.

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Pickledtezcat

I'm an English teacher living in South Korea, I'm married and have two young sons, which makes it rather difficult to devote much time to my projects, but whenever I can I try to sit down and write some code or make some content and keep on building my dream.